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From: ram+@cs.cmu.edu (Rob MacLachlan)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: The Emperor Strikes Lethe
Message-ID: <1991Apr9.003803.28561@cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 9 Apr 91 00:38:03 GMT
References: <43.UUL1.3#913@acw.UUCP>
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Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
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>From: guthery@acw.UUCP (Scott Guthery)
>Newsgroups: comp.object
>Subject: The Emperor Strikes Lethe
>Date: 7 Apr 91 16:56:40 GMT
>
>The OO community will be forced to discover that software consumers won't pay
>development-time taxes at runtime the same way the Lisp community did.

Hmmn, being a Lisp system developer, refresh my memory of what we discovered?
Although some Lisp hackers may have dreamed of displacing all other 
programming languages, it has always been the case that what Lisp systems
excelled at was research and prototyping.

>If
>you write your product in some OO language, I'll come out with a competing
>product in written C or maybe even assembler, give all those cycles back to
>the customer, and whip you in the marketplace.  I might thank you for
>defining the product and opening the market which I understand you did by
>using OO technology.  But a thank you and a cloud of dust is all you'll get.
>

Well, I guess I can't expect too much gratitude.  But you seem to be
half-acknowledging that resource-intensive programming systems may have a
productive role in research and development.  Mass market programs will
always be written at a lower level (and with more hand-tuning) than limited
market programs or prototypes.  This is because the mass market justifies
spending more effort in programming.

  Rob